"I have all the clients I can handle right here in Washington. We'll go to San Francisco when I say we're going." He could barely see through the red haze building behind his eyes. She was his wife. She'd do what he told her to do.
Cathy shrugged her shoulders and said, "Suit yourself. Trevor and I are leaving in three weeks, with or without you. Your choice." Face tight, she exited the vehicle, strode up the steps and through the open door.
George bolted from the car and up the stairs after her. If she thought for one minute she was getting away with this, she had another thing coming, by God. Indeed she did. Mrs. Kayman would move to San Francisco when Mr. Kayman said she could and not one day sooner. Not one day.
Chapter 7
Munoz
It was nearly six o'clock when Munoz, freshly dressed and calm, strolled from his quarters in the Diocese House to the garage at the edge of the cobbled drive. "Father Paul?"
A young priest, scrubbing dust from a sleek hood, jerked to attention. "Yes, Eminence."
"I need the car. I left some of my notes at the Cloister and I need them to finish my report to His Holiness."
"Certainly, your Eminence." Father Paul laid aside his cleaning cloth and slipped behind the wheel.
"No, no. You don't have to drive me." Munoz looked at his watch. "They'll be ringing your dinner hour shortly." He smiled with concern. "I won't use your time because I was careless." A sonorous bell sounded across the pavilion. "There. You see. Now go, enjoy your meal. I'll have this monster back and in the garage by the time you're finished with prayers."
"Thank you, your Eminence. That's most kind of you." The Priest slid out of the car and handed the keys to the Cardinal. "You're sure?"
Munoz waved his hands in a shooing motion. "Go, get along with you." He chuckled with good-natured camaraderie.
The booming bell ceased. Munoz watched the priest jog toward the stately buildings of the cathedral conclave. The young fool, he thought. He really should have insisted on driving me. He knows the rules.
No sooner had Father Paul disappeared than Munoz entered the garage, grabbed an LED lamp, and returned to the automobile. He slid into the driver's seat. The charge light glowed full as the drive cells purred to life. Humming to himself, the Cardinal circled the block occupied by the cathedral and headed west on California Street.
He had fallen in love with San Francisco on his first visit and had been determined to make it his resident home even before he saw the bluff property. Like any tourist, he had gasped and puffed his way in awe. In 2036, the city had been rocked for three consecutive days by a series of earthquakes that leapt up the Richter scale. Six months of ravaging aftershocks followed. When it was over, San Franciscans buried their dead—eighteen thousand had lost their lives—and rebuilt their city. An astounding city then, an astounding city now, Munoz thought.
He turned north to Lincoln Boulevard, followed it around to El Camino del Mar. Minutes later, he drove onto the deserted demolition site and parked the limousine. In the waning light and incoming fog, the rubble seemed to circle and creep like wild dogs hunting. Staring into the silent gloom, he jumped as a foghorn moaned, then shook his fist at mist-shrouded rubble.
"Creep all you want," he hissed. "It will change nothing. Those relics belong to me now, whether you like it or not." He laughed nervously at the sound of his voice, not believing that he'd actually threatened chunks of concrete.
He strode to the foreman's shack, shoved open the door, and flipped on the light. Looped around two pegs on the far wall, just as he remembered, a coil of nylon rope glistened in the light. He lugged the rope to the open shaft, tied one end around his waist, attached the lamp securely to the knot, and looped the other end around the base of the broken altar, making sure it would stay put. Switching on the lamp, he lowered himself over the edge and onto the first wooden step.
As if the fates no longer cared, he reached the bottom rung without mishap. He untied the rope and let it drop. His hand trembled as he flashed the light around the room. A thin film of moisture beaded the walls. His gaze focused on a tiny crack in the floor. Water seeping through had formed a puddle that quivered with rhythmic ripples. Even as he watched, the crack widened.
The sea was coming through.
He wouldn't be cheated. Whatever was here belonged to him and he intended to take it, sea or no sea. Beneath his feet, the floor shuddered.
Munoz leaped to the small door and raised his fist. "Now, let's see if you were as clever as I think you were," he muttered, cracking his fist hard against the center of the door. Slowly, it swung open. "I knew it! Who would suspect that a door with no key really had no key?" Thrusting his arms inside the small alcove, he withdrew a wooden chest with carved figures twisted into handles. So light. Was it empty?
Something brushed his ankle; he looked down. The end of the rope snaked back and forth between his feet. Water streamed through the crack in the floor and the pounding rhythm of ocean waves thundered in his ears. He remembered the early morning news and his jaw went slack. The deep-water corkscrew had arrived.
Up, his mind screamed. Up the shaft!
He scrambled for the rope, looped it around the container and through a carved figure. Leaving enough slack to clear his feet, he tied the rope to his waist with fumbling fingers. Only then did he remember the lamp, still on the floor where he'd placed it while tying the box to his waist. He reached for the lamp. It rolled just out of reach, half in and half out of the widening pool of water. He felt the rock beneath his feet twist and arch. Time had run out, he had to climb—fast. As he grabbed the ladder's bottom rung and pulled himself up, he heard the crack, like the sound of a laser beam smashing walls.
The peculiar salt-fish tang assailed his nostrils. Water licked his thighs and tugged at his precious cargo. The chest snagged, its carved Cherubim jammed between the lower rung and the side rail. Bending down, Munoz tried to wiggle the container back and forth.
The box held.
Swearing softly, he lowered himself to the offending rung. A clawing suction grabbed his feet then released them with a gurgled sigh as the water abruptly vanished. In the blackness, he heard the roar and he knew. With a muffled cry, he yanked the box free, hugged it tight to his body with his arms and legs, and flung himself free of the ladder. The sea, a juggernaut of fury, slammed into his body and threw him upward as if spewing a lethal poison.
Munoz sat rigid, cold, and wet in the lighted safety of the maintenance shack, the box clutched tightly between his knees. He tried to ignore the agonizing pain in his dangling arm. Eventually, the Bishop would send someone looking for him. On the other hand, that young priest, Paul, might come without telling the Bishop that he had allowed his Eminence the Cardinal to drive himself to a deserted demolition site. He grimaced. Either way, the chest would become Church property. That would not do, not do at all. He owed nothing to the Church of Universals. He had paid his dues.
His mind filled with memories.
A dark December morning, the wet taste of snow in the gusting wind, shoes squeaking on marble floors, the musty smell of soaked raincoats, the sacristy hush: his first day to don the cassock of a Vatican altar boy. On that day, listening to the power whispering down frescoed corridors, his life became purposefully directed. He chose the Church as his profession for the same reason he chose escargot to eat; both brought to the palate a richness of taste impossible to ignore, yet neither appealed to the faint at heart.
His mother was delighted with his choice. Not so, his father. "You are a man of the world, Raphael," he'd said. "The life of a priest is not for you. The cost will be too high."
Yet each time he'd walked the piazza or polished the cups of gold or stared into the awed faces of the congregation, he had seen the power of the Church flowing like a river of fire. He intended to ride that river, to feel every swell. He would pay the price.
Over the years the sacrifices were many. The Church taught him well with lessons sometimes cruel, but entrance to the sac
red hierarchy made it all worthwhile. She could keep as tuition earned what She had already taken, but not the box. That, and all it contained, belonged to him.
From below, headlights blinked and disappeared; a car was coming. Frantic, he looked about the shack and spied a clawed hammer some worker had tossed into the corner. As the lights swung into view at the end of the drive, Munoz cracked open the domed lid and extracted a leather-bound volume with a gold filigree hasp and corner protectors. Except for the name Razi-el burned into its cover, so faint it was scarcely legible, this book was just like all the others removed from the cloister. Disbelieving, he ran his hand around the inside of the container. It was empty: no Covenant contract, no Solomon's Seal. All this for a book, he thought, a book no different than those already in my possession. Hysterical laughter built and he struggled to keep it controlled. He could not accept that, would not accept that! The book must have value, else why was it concealed in the manner it was?
"Your Eminence! Are you here?"
The Cardinal swiveled his head in the direction of the voice. The new arrival had parked on the far side of the limousine. Ten seconds and he would be at the shack. Munoz closed the box and slid the hammer across the floor. Shoving the volume inside his shirt, he lodged it between his body and the upper half of his broken arm. With his other hand, he pulled the arm against the book. He cried out as pain seared through his body, but he held the arm tight. Laying his head against the container, he fought the rising nausea. He would give them the chest, an artifact retrieved at great personal risk, but not the book. That belonged to him. A hand touched his shoulder; Father Paul had come by himself.
At the Diocese House, Munoz refused the young priest's help. Awkward and moaning, he scooted himself from the car.
"Get the doctor, bring him to my room."
"But . . . yes, Your Eminence. Right away."
Munoz hurried across the pavilion. He released his injured arm long enough to open the ponderous door and felt the volume fall to his waist. Bishop Northrop rustled down the quiet hallway, his face filled with concern. Munoz brushed him aside. "Not now, Your Excellency. Not now." He slipped into his room, sagged against the door as it closed with a click. The room wavered, began to tilt. The book. He had to hide the book.
He staggered to his closet. There. Behind the robe. His knees began to quiver. He bit his lip and tasted blood. For an instant, his head cleared. Munoz yanked the book from under his shirt, shoved it over the closet rod, and watched it drop behind his sacrament robe. Even as the soft thud sounded in his ears, he fainted.
Chapter 8
Munoz
Even though the black chest was empty, Munoz was commended for his bravery in retrieving it for the Church. When questioned by the Holy Father, the wizened Guardian Mother of The Sisters of the Covenant Ark professed ignorance of the underground grotto, but her eyes filled with anger when she looked at Munoz. The box was ensconced in the Petrine Museum where visiting dignitaries debated what it might have held while they stroked carved cherubim handles.
Munoz removed seventeen additional volumes with filigree hasps and corner protectors from Cloister storage boxes and kept them locked behind mahogany panels in the library of his San Francisco residence. Each night, he labored over the ancient hieratic script of the volume from the rock room. As he deciphered page after page, his palms sweated and his heart pounded at what he read. Nearly halfway through the translation, he tossed the book aside. "We have centuries of accumulated knowledge in the vaults. Everything we teach, everything we believe is based on that knowledge," he muttered. "If this were true, we would have known. You are a fool, Raphael, giving credence to something that cannot be."
A memory from the early years of his Vatican service nudged its way to the forefront of his thoughts. He recalled the small box labeled NH-CV Collection ***9 that he had smuggled out of the Petrine storage vaults and stashed inside his study desk. His fingers tingled as he remembered the feel of those frangible skins: ancient documents asserting that man's essence, reaching toward perfection, incarnated time and again. The testaments presented tantalizing, albeit mercurial, support for the reincarnation claim.
In the eyes of the Church, to defend or deny such a claim was to consider its validity, and to consider was tantamount to blasphemy. Indeed, it was a sacrilege in his own eyes at the time and no doubt would have remained so if not for the wounding epithets hurled upon him when Pope Ignacio discovered him reading forbidden documents. At that moment, what had been nothing more than fascinating insight into the far side of an evolving belief became an idea to explore, a doubt he refused to acknowledge, a question that wouldn’t let go.
His lips pursed at the recollection. Twenty-two years since the incident and still the question: did his Bishop’s wrath come because a Vatican fledgling had wandered, unsupervised, through restricted areas of the Petrine storehouse, or did it erupt because the writings held a truth that doctrinal guardians had suppressed for centuries, and intended to keep suppressed? He glanced toward the book on his desk.
Do I really want to consider? he thought, hands raking through his hair. His body moved in a gentle rocking motion as he tipped heel-to-toe-to-heel. "Do I?" he whispered, his gaze fixed on the ancient tome. The pages drew him back, drew him ever deeper into the secrets they revealed. On occasion, he opened one or another of the Cloister journals and studied the contents, checking and cross-checking.
Time passed swiftly—summer to winter to spring to fall.
Evidence mounted.
Late one evening, he closed the book and swiped at the moisture beading his upper lip. Forehead drawn into deep ridges, he paced the floor of his palace library. Consideration was one thing, but to see it spelled out in detail and declared as a promise was another. He stared out the window, watched leaves swirl and settle in heaps of red and gold. A tic of annoyance raised his brow. The translation had stolen from him the fragrance of spring, the hot colors of summer, had held his mind captive even while tending his Vatican duties. He sighed. It mattered not if what he read proved true.
If.
Verify, he thought. How can I verify?
Vittorio’s pet project! The ATP is the perfect tool. If it’s as thorough as Cardinal Morandi claims, I’ll get my answers. Striding to the telescreen, he punched in the international code for Rome, followed by the Vatican number. Yes, indeed, he thought, listening to the clicks and tones of stations being accessed. The Ancestral Tracking Project, a monumental historical compilation begun nearly a century prior, traced family lineage back through the annals of time. It was a difficult, time-consuming task fraught with generation gaps, misleading information, surname changes, and line extinction. Under Vittorio Cardinal Morandi’s watchful eyes, the research continued. At the last business meeting, Vittorio had proudly announced that 100% of the world’s current population had been tracked as far back as A.D. 1352, complete with photo verification of supporting documents where possible.
"Vatican. How may I direct your call?"
"Cardinal Morandi," he said to the anonymous voice. A pucker formed between his eyes as he listened. "No, I won’t leave a message. Tell him I'm holding." A brilliant red background with a three dimensional image of the gold Tiara and Keys replaced the dazzle pattern of the call screen.
He rocked heel-to-toe, recalling a brief salute after the fateful Vatican meeting that made the bluff property his. When all was said and done, Vittorio had quietly tipped the financial report to his forehead. You are still the master of the wait-and-rule principle, that salute had said.
Morandi is no fool, Munoz thought as he waited. He could feel the frown begin to pucker again. The man will ask questions. He reached for the disconnect button.
"Cardinal Morandi here." Vittorio's deep voice resounded through the room as his features flashed onto the telescreen.
Hanging up was no longer an option, diverting curiosity was.
"I need an ATP printout of all births in years 1532, 1676, 1820, and 1964 for a proj
ect we're setting up at Grace Cathedral," Munoz said without preamble. "Can your program do that?"
"Depends. If you want a stripped list—no. The data is grouped by family line. I can pull up a name and with a little work, I can pull out the year, but breaking the lines into specific birth lists—" Vittorio paused and Munoz could see questions forming in the man’s eyes.
"That’s a shame. It would have been so much easier if—oh well, we’re only talking four years. Send me a laser ‘fiche for those years, we can dig it out here. Give our young statisticians something to do, eh?"
"Are you looking for something specific?" Vittorio probed.
"No, just birth numbers."
"Ummm. Comparative surveys are a lot of work, Raphael. Using only the number of births in a given year can be misleading—assuming that’s what you’re trying to put together, of course."
Munoz made no reply and after a moment’s hesitation, Vittorio continued with, "Want us to help?"
"And deprive the Grace staff of the opportunity to learn what’s involved in developing outreach analysis?" He chuckled. "No, they need the practice, Vittorio, but your idea of breaking out components of the ancestral information into searchable lists has tremendous potential. Especially given the amount of information contained in those family lines. Yes, indeed. An excellent idea—and who better than yourself to bring it about?"
Vittorio flushed with pleasure at the compliment. "Yes. Well, I’ll give it some thought. Yes."
"But not before—"
"Your lists, I know. That shouldn't take too long. Give me twenty-four hours at least, maybe a couple of days. Anything else before we sign off?"
"That's all." Munoz paused. "His Holiness. Is he well?"
Vittorio's image shook its head. "Confined to bed, now. It's just a matter of time. Conclave is being called and three names have already been presented for consideration. Are you interested?"
Shadows in the House With Twelve Rooms Page 6